Boom.Diwan

Thank you for this great honor and for the beautiful write up 🌊🤍🌊. We’re in great company 🙏

In his teenage years, jazz guitarist and ethnomusicologist Ghazi Faisal Al-Mulaifi listened to stories from his grandfather, one of Kuwait’s last master pearl divers before the nation’s shift to oil led to the practice being outlawed, as head of ensemble Boom.Diwan and in collaboration with Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra director Arturo O’Farrill on new album Live in the Khaleej!, he pays tribute to divers and their daily practices by intertwining pearl-diving song styles, central African dance sounds, and broadly American jazz and blues.

In many ways, it’s an emulation of Kuwaiti cosmopolitanism as the group’s repertoire moves from ten minutes of sparse melancholy on “Ana Mashoof” to rhumba-powered “Muneera”, then to swirling and wailing “Blue” and freeform “Compay Doug” before ending with mournful “Utviklingssang”. This is rich jazz made by a group thoughtful about their roots, music, and scholarship, more powerful for each other. Even more than that, Live in the Khaleej! is communication between musicians, between cultures, between times, and between performers and audiences, beautifully done.

For your GRAMMY© Consideration!

Ghazi & Boom.Diwan x Arturo O’Farrill

Album: Live in the Khaleej!

Categories:

Best Alternative Jazz Album
Best Jazz Performance
Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical - Estelle Galloway
Best Album Notes - Ashley Kahn

Recorded live in The Black Box at The Arts Center at NYUAD

Dig it!